Trump, Not Media, Will Be Big Loser At Fake News Awards

You don't need to know much about politics, the media, or public relations to know that Donald Trump seems dead set on drawing the largest possible audience to watch the president shoot himself in the foot on Monday afternoon.

A one-off joke from last November, the idea of handing out "fake news" awards to journalists and news organizations came thundering back this week, with a tweet announcing the "Most Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards of the Year," which Trump put on the calendar for 5 p.m. ET on Monday, the day after the Golden Globes.

There's every reason in the world for any clear-thinking person in the White House to want to squeeze the life out of this idea and bury it in the desert, but can anyone sway Trump when he's convinced he's got a brilliant idea? We'll know next week.

The early indicators suggest the answer is a resounding no. On Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who could have laughed off the fake news awards as a joke, instead seemed to be playing along (as did some journalists, who seemed interested in whether there would be trophies or not). "My guess is that there are quite a few individuals that could be up for those awards," Sanders said.

The problem, of course, is that to win a fake news award from Donald Trump, you have to have created journalism that angered the president--and so far, that's been done by reporters who have produced damaging reports about Trump and his administration. In most situations, you manage a critical news story aggressively when it's published, and then do whatever you can to move the news cycle forward and onto something new.

What you don't do--and what the "fake news awards" seem designed to do--is draw everyone's attention back to the very stories you didn't like in the first place. Hey, remember the Russia investigation? Let's get back to that.

No, simply labeling the stories "dishonest and corrupt" doesn't make it okay. Everyone knows the definition of "fake news," as Dan Rather told me last year, is any story Trump doesn't like. It's understood that "fake news" is part of Trump's effort to undermine the power of the free press by attacking its credibility. "No president has leveled this kind of pernicious and really sometimes vicious assault against individual reporters," Rather said, noting that even when Trump plays like he's joking, he does so from the White House, and that matters, as he's using "the full force and prestige of the presidency to demonize" that with which he disagrees.

And there's nothing funny about that--whether there are tacky gold statues or not.

The awards idea has rushed to farce status, with CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show's Trevor Noah campaigning for the awards--while simultaneously mocking the president:

Assuming Trump-friendly shows like Fox & Friends won't even be nominated, it's hard to imagine viewers turning away from a network like CNN in the event it takes home a huge number of awards. The New York Times, of course, has credited Trump's criticism of the newspaper for a sharp rise in digital subscriptions. It's easy to imagine journalists updating their Twitter bios to proclaim themselves winners of the inaugural Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards.

The other concern for anyone who wants to see Trump succeed is that every moment spent talking about fake news time not spent talking about the president's agenda--and the deadly serious issues that face the country, like the threat of nuclear war with North Korea. To follow a my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours taunt on Twitter with the announcement of the fake news awards, as Trump did, suggests that Michael Wolff hit pretty close to home with his portrayal of a media-obsessed and decidedly unserious president who'd rather watch TV news than work on policy.

As Matt Gertz writes in Politico, "there is no strategy to Trump's Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that's how cable news works."

None of this is strategic on Trump's part, but a grown-up should be able to step in and save the president from himself. A news release issued by the White House, perhaps in the form of a short list of stories considered false or faulty in their reporting on the Trump administration, could include a passing reference to the awards idea, saying "if we gave out trophies for dishonest and corrupt reporting, these stories would probably be winners." And that's it. Any suggestion the president was devoting time to the awards or taking it seriously, should be laughed off. "He's got work to do."

Will that happen? As Trump says, "stay tuned."

Mark Joyella is a journalist, writer and public speaker; you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook